MHI Blog -- President Obama recently unveiled new executive actions to strengthen U.S. advanced manufacturing, spur innovation and make the U.S. a magnet for new jobs and investment.

The Departments of Defense, Energy, Agriculture and NASA recently announced more than $300 million in new investments. The Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) Steering Committee, a working group of the President’s Council of Advisors in Science and Technology, announced in the "Accelerating US Advanced Manufacturing Report," that they have identified three technologies critical to U.S. competitiveness: advanced materials including composites and bio-based materials, advanced sensors for manufacturing, and digital manufacturing.

EBN -- Embedded sensor technologies have been used in varying degrees in supply chains for well over a decade, but the Internet of Things (IoT) today is more realistic in the supply chain than ever before, thanks to a convergence of numerous sensor types extending across all aspects of transportation systems.

The data that companies need to streamline their supply chain and logistics operations is pouring in from a myriad of touch points and technologies. Yet, having the technology to collect the necessary data is only a best first step. The tools to accurately, efficiently, and inexpensively aggregate and leverage that data for improved supply chain visibility and tracking are not yet in place.

Industry Week -- The road to creating user-friendly, science-backed, technology-enabled supply chains is paved with good sustainability intentions that get foiled by today’s dynamic, global complexities. Achieving sustainability of scale requires involvement of the entire supply chain. To meet the needs of customers and markets, manufacturers need up-to-date and accurate information about their suppliers’ materials and components.

Bloomberg -- United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) said it expects six days during this holiday season to surpass its single-busiest shipping day last year, a workload sure to put its yearlong preparation to the test as online retail sales rise.

The world’s largest package delivery company today forecast it will deliver more than 585 million packages in December. That’s up 11 percent from a year ago, when harsh weather and a surge of last-minute online retail orders overwhelmed UPS’s capacity and forced it to miss some Christmas deliveries.

Supply Chain Quarterly -- As Amazon expands into logistics services, the giant retailer is taking on more of the characteristics of a third-party logistics (3PL) company. How might that shape the industry's competitive landscape?

Amazon.com has come a long way since its founder and chief executive officer, Jeff Bezos, envisioned the company as a virtual bookstore. It has evolved into an online retail giant that generated US $74.45 billion in revenues in 2013, much of that coming from its support of more than two million companies that used Amazon to sell their products online and distribute them to customers. Under the company's various programs, Amazon not only provides its customers with a means of advertising and selling their products, but also offers to store those products in its fulfillment centers; pick, pack, and ship them; and provide customer service, including handling returns.

Modern Materials Handling -- When the materials handling and logistics industry’s premier event, ProMat 2015, opens on March 23, 2015 it will include more than 800 exhibits from leading solution providers and a comprehensive Educational Conference of more than 100 sessions focusing on what’s next in best-in-class solutions for manufacturing and supply chain operations.

The ProMat Conference will include four keynotes and a Supply Chain Workforce Summit. The conference also features more than 100 show floor educational seminars covering leading trends, best practices and state-of-the-art equipment and technology solutions that can make manufacturing and the entire supply chain work more efficiently and profitably.

Star Tribune -- Retailers will push shoppers to not be such procrastinators this holiday season -- at least when it comes to placing online orders after last year’s shipping snafu.

About 79 percent of retailers will set their standard shipping deadlines for guaranteed Christmas delivery to expire at least a week before the holiday, compared to 74 percent who said they would do so last year, according to a survey conducted for Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation.

Industrial Supply Magazine -- The list of competitors is growing, as are the tactics they are using to take customers from traditional fastener, tool, industrial and MRO distributors. But there are tactics that traditional distributors can use to cost-effectively fight the latest move.

Inbound Logistics -- Intermodal transportation is a big deal, and it's steadily getting bigger. The numbers bear that out. Rail intermodal loadings posted year-over-year gains for 56 months in a row, reported the Association of American Railroads (AAR) in July 2014. Ocean containers also fuel the intermodal boom. For example, the National Retail Federation (NRF) predicted in August 2014 that import volumes at U.S. ports covered by its Global Tracker report would reach the highest level ever recorded for one month since the NRF launched the Tracker in 2000. Much of that container traffic moves to and from seaports on intermodal chassis hauled by drayage trucks, or else it gets loaded directly onto trains.

Railway Age -- With intermodal leading the way, U.S. rail freight traffic during the week ending Oct. 25, 2014 maintained growth momentum, the Association of American Railroads reported Thursday, Oct. 30.

U.S. freight carload traffic did fine itself, up 3.5% when measured against the comparable week in 2013. U.S. intermodal was up 6.7%, said AAR, which noted the gain represented "the third highest intermodal week in history for U.S. railroads." Total combined U.S. weekly rail traffic up 5% over the same week in 2013.

Material Handling & Logistics -- Merger and acquisition (M&A) deal activity increased 25 percent year-over-year across the global industrial products (IP) sector during the third quarter of 2014, according to PwC US. Four of six IP subsectors generated deal volume gains, with the total number of mega deals (transactions worth more than $1 billion) rising as well, resulting in an increase in average transaction value compared to the same period last year. With sustained momentum through the first nine months of the year, 2014 is on pace to be the strongest year for M&A since the financial crisis.

EBN -- The threat of cyberattacks extends well beyond major corporations. Recent incidents suggest hackers are turning up the heat on the supply chain as the networks of larger companies have become increasingly hard to crack. Bottom line: Watch out.

A special report by Kaspersky Lab, an international IT security vendor with 300 million users, cautions small and midsized businesses against complacency since they tend to be used as "stepping stones" when cyber criminals stage attacks against larger enterprises.

World Trade -- Air freight rates from Asia to North America and Europe are expected to rise through to the end of the year following four months of stable pricing, according to the recently expanded Sea & Air Shipper Insight report published by shipping consultancy Drewry.

Drewry’s East-West Air Freight Price Index, a weighted average of air freight rates across 21 East-West trades, rose 0.7 points in September to 103.7 points. The increase in pricing brought the index up to within just 0.1 points of April’s high and 3.8 points above last year’s level, indicative of the recovery in airfreight over the past 12 months.

MHI Blog -- As the globalization, expansion, and growing interconnectivity of supply chains make them more complex, businesses and their suppliers are faced with new challenges, with new opportunities for growth. Many top companies invest a vast amount of resources in innovation. This commitment to innovation drives growth as they compete to remain top manufacturers and service providers. However, many of these top companies are not reaching their full potential. Their businesses are innovating, growing, and developing, but many of their suppliers are not.

Supply Chain Brain -- While the buzz around mobile transactions is currently high, it shouldn't be considered as a check-box exercise when evaluating solutions. Mobility for the sake of mobility doesn't make financial or operational sense. To really deliver value, mobile transactions should be a tangible, measurable part of an overall improvement strategy for your supply chain operations.

Logistics Management -- Leading SCM analysts explore the top trends in cloud-based TMS, share how they’re affecting end-to-end supply chains, and give us the inside track on a few up-and-coming trends we’re soon to see in the cloud.